The jewish cemetary was established a very long time ago (which is why it's so crowded) - I believe that they were given a separate place from the christians for typically goofy religious reasons. Most of the tombstones that have readable dates were from the 1800-1930 period and they suddenly stop after about 1940 when the nazis wiped out the jewish population. Under soviet rule the cemetary was pretty much left to grow wild - the soviets were pretty antisemetic, too - and it's slowly coming back under maintenance now.

I'm not superstitious but it was a very creepy place to wander around in. It's a huge space and it's just jammed with trees, tombstones, and little weedy paths. I went there specifically to shoot some photos for stock because I know there are a lot of goths on DA. I picked up a little tour-book at the hotel and it said that the cemetary was "picturesque" and it was only 3 miles away - a nice walk. I was there all afternoon walking around with Controlled Bleeding blasting in my headphones via my iPod.

The toughest part of the whole place, for me, was a little memorial near the entrance with a sign saying "this memorial is to the 1,000,000 jewish children murdered by nazi barbarians" and the whole memorial was covered with little photographs of kids that people had brought and sandwiched between pieces of glass, and glued and cemented to its walls. Seeing all the photos of kids - smiling, playing, posing - and knowing that they had been loved by their parents but brutally murdered - all these little pictures, rotting from rain and moisture - it was pretty intense. I left the place very sad, angry, and depressed.

This image was leaned-on pretty heavily in photoshop to make it somewhat represent how I felt about the place. If you want to see what the original looked like, it's here: [link] Alterations to this image consist of a channel mixer layer (b&w conversion) a huge/saturation layer (blue cold tone) a blur layer (with blend mode set to "darken", erased on the path to keep it sharp but left intact to make the trees dark and fuzzy looking) and two curves layers. One curves layer was used to brighten and up-contrast the path, and the other to darken the trees.